OT: Cal Berkeley Study Finds Athletes Respond Better to Fiery v Upbeat Halftime Speeches

Where's Buddy Stephens when you need him?

So... should start bringing in the presidential candidates for the halftime speeches?

I think this is interesting and likely holds true for a violent sport, but my intuition tells me that this is not a transferable strategy for building/inspiring teams in other realms (science, business, medicine, education, etc.).

I gave it my all no matter what I didn’t need someone to come coach me up. I barely listened to them anyways.  

If we were losing pretty badly, I preferred a fiery, yet not demeaning speech.

Ok 

Halftime adjustments followed by a good fiery positive let’s go speech was something my team and I always enjoyed. 

I had good, fiery speeches from football coaches that turned games around.  And I had egotistical, demeaning tirades from basketball coaches that made the team no longer give a sh**.

Not that I was ever a D1 athlete, but even in HS I always felt more motivated getting our ass chewed than I did the "ra ra, let's try harder" speech.

Leadership is hard. You can neither demean nor pander to them, because then they won't respect you. And threading the needle in between -- that inspiration sweet spot yielding high amplitude, healthy motivation -- is not a common gift.

I think it depends on what's happening in the game. If someone is working hard and the ball just isn't bouncing their way, it would be better to be encouraging. However, if they're playing sloppy, not focused, taking plays off, etc. it would probably be better to be more fiery to wake them up.

I have incontrovertible proof that they respond best to speeches that refer to "The Team" in triplicate.

I've listened to (and given, I guess) a lot of halftime speeches, and I've only really seen one extremely negative, kick-in-the-pants speech produce a good second-half performance. Basically, if the coach comes out blaming the players for being stupid or lazy, they'll continue to be stupid and/or lazy in the second half. I was around one coach who was REALLY bad at halftime speeches for several years, and I usually found a reason to avoid the locker room for the halftime speech to avoid the negativity and eyeroll-worthy repetition.

My coaches in high school were pretty good at it...but the guy who was the best at it was kind of a douche in his personal life, as I later found out. That info definitely would have soured my opinion of his speeches if I had known about it in high school.

Anyway, it really annoys me when 40- or 50-year-old men think belittling 16- or 17-year-olds at halftime is going to make them more confident to go out there and overcome a deficit in the second half.

I'm in a performance field and I have to say most of the best performers seen to be motivated by an absolute hatred of screwing up rather than just trying to do your best and having fun.

I’m skeptical of any findings when a study has this much subjectivity involved. How do they categorize a speech that starts off fiery but finishes with encouraging words? Or how different individuals express anger. My mom yelled when she was angry. My dad just tensed up and had “the look”. Also, how are they categorizing “improvement” from one half to another. Just scores? A lot of luck could be involved.

Every player is different. I was pretty even keeled regardless of how well or how poor I was playing. When coaches yelled at me, all I could think about was that they seemed irrational and it didn’t make sense for me to listen to someone that couldn’t control their thoughts or emotions. Never gained anything from coaches that tried to pump me up with encouragement either. I liked the coaches that were closer to teachers than your stereotypical intense rah rah coach. Just wanted them to work with me on the game plan and calmly explain the changes they thought I needed to make

Yeah!

It's an interesting finding, though I'm sure the authors of the study would agree that it's a pretty limited sample (mostly Northern California coaches for a season).  That said, it wouldn't surprise me that a focused speech pointing out where improvements needed to be made would be effective.  Of course, we also live in a world where Brian Kelly pops blood vessels for 3 hours and Notre Dame continues to win, so who the hell knows.

In my experience, the most effective coaches, bosses and leaders are the ones who inspire their people to want to give their absolute 100% best for them. If you’re ready to give everything for your leader and because of your leader, then that’s a person who can motivate better than most. 

We all have friends like that who we would give everything for, but few of us have coaches or bosses like that. It’s a fine line to have the authority to “make” someone do something and yet inspire them to want to do it with everything they have. 

Bottom line is it comes down to real relationships. If you have a coach who’s a jerk (my high school JV Baseball Coach comes to mind), then a tongue-lashing just makes you want to check out and hate them even more. But if that coach is someone you like, care about, and know cares about you - then the same type of speech inspires a completely different response. 

I don’t think you can just distill something like this down to a formula of what type of speech works best. The person giving it matters even more, in my experience. 

They must have looked at Don Brown's face to reach the conclusion:

Rumor has it, that in the SEC they respond best to halftime payouts in cash. $$$

See, “Wolf of Wallstreet.” 

Rah rah or something like Kurt Russell doing Herb Brooks in Miracle.  A classic halftime / between periods speech.  Just watched a bunch of docs on the 2017 team on BTN, Don Brown can give a pretty good one too!!  Wish it had been on HBO!